The Flaming Lips Albums Ranked

American Head, The Flaming Lips’ 16th(!) studio album, is a timely reminder that America’s weirdest psych rockers are more than bubble-bound festival mainstays. Forming in Oklahoma in the mid-80s and zagging from generic garage rock to 90s alt heroes to indie rock godfathers, the Wayne Coyne-led band has outlasted its peers and covered more stylistic ground successfully than any other band I can think of in the last 30 years. At their late-90s/early-00s peak, the Lips full-hearted symphonies paved the way for Obama-era optimism. In the band’s darker moments, though, the Fearless Freaks show that we’ve got plenty to be afraid of, finding ways to channel anxiety and violence in ways that resound more in 2020 than upon their initial release. 

17. Hear It Is (1986)

Listening to the Lips’ first album is a jarring experience, less so because of what’s there and more so because of what’s missing. Even though Wayne Coyne was only 27 when the album was recorded, he sounds much older than he would on future releases, singing in a low register that has none of the Neil Young-ish charm that makes the Lips’ music so recognizable. In its heavier moments, Hear It Is sounds like a Minuteman cover band, but not a particularly memorable one, and the slower moments are forgettable. So what to make of this album? Honestly, not much. The songs are serviceable—a couple (“With You”, “Godzilla Flick”) are actually pretty good—but there’s nothing here to make the album worth seeking out except as proof of how much the Lips grew in the next six years.

16. Telepathic Surgery (1989)

The Flaming Lips’ first three albums are pretty boring. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that there’s nothing on them that stands out in any way, and Telepathic Surgery continues that trend. It’s weird hearing them sound like an anonymous bar band when they’d move on to such memorable highs in just a few short years.

15. Oh My Gawd!!! (1987)

Wayne’s still singing like a generic 80s garage rock frontman, and the Lips hadn’t found their way to what makes them special. Still, Oh My Gawd!!! finds the band at least moving in the right direction. “Thanks To You” is pretty good, even if it sounds like the Lips cosplaying REM.

14. At War With the Mystics (2006)

When At War With the Mystics was announced with lead single “The W.A.N.D.”, expectations couldn’t have been higher. The band was coming off two stone-cold classics, they’d never been more culturally relevant, and “W.A.N.D.” was a spiky, political rock track in a time that seemed politically tense.* Too bad the album turned out to be terrible.** The first two songs, “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and “Free Radicals”, sound less like songs than showcases of how many weird blips and burps the Lips could fit into 8 minutes. So much of this album is actively annoying, it obscures the highlights, the highest of which (“Mr. Ambulance Driver”, “Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung”) are actually fantastic, unique entries in the Lips canon. But there’s no missing the fact that out of this bunch, only half the songs are listenable. In a discography with as many head-scratchers as this one, At War With the Mystics is the one truly cloying album. The fact that the band could go from Yoshimi to this in a few short years might be the Lips’ biggest head-scratcher or all.

13. King’s Mouth (2019)***

How King’s Mouth found its way into the Lips canon as a studio album instead of a Record Store Day exclusive is baffling. While not totally sounding as slapped together as some of their lesser offerings, it comes across as a half-assed idea with a few tuneful moments scattered throughout. That said, the half-assed ideas are at least sonically in the wheelhouse of Yoshimi, which means the songs go down pretty easy. With more attention to detail (and fewer narrations/lyrics about severed heads), the seeds of this project could have sprouted into something better. But as it stands, it’s a slight lil’ curio that doesn’t demand repeat listenings like most Lips albums.

12. In a Priest Drive Ambulance (1990)

“There You Are” is the first moment in the Lips discography where you can discern where they’re headed. A lovely acoustic ballad backed by a chorus of crickets, it also sticks out like a sore thumb on this brain-melting connection of noise rock that sounds similar to other like-minded late-80s rockers that blew up in the 90s (think Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr.). For the first time in their career, the band wrote some tunes to hang their noise on, and Priest starts the trajectory that continued throughout the 90s all the way to Clouds Taste Metallic. Unlike their next few albums, though, melodies are scarce. Priest lacks most of the strengths the Lips would go on to develop later in the 90s, and though it’s a solid record, don’t expect it to sound like the band you know and love.

11. Oczy Mlody (2017)

Oczy Mlody scans as second-tier Lips from the get go, but the highs start to reveal themselves upon re-listening. In particular, the album starts off with a solid four-song run that show the Lips hadn’t lost any of their production prowess. “There Should Be Unicorns”, with its bug-eyed Reggie Watts outro and hilarious description of hedonism, is a Fellini-esque head trip. There are also some moments of genuine beauty—“The Castle” would’ve been a standout even on Yoshimi. But there are more filler tracks on Oczy than any album since At War With the Mystics, one of which (“Do Glowy”) is probably the dumbest song in the whole Lips discography. Quite a feat! Half-baked in the worst way but baked in the best way, Oczy is a grab bag with some bright spots that doesn’t hold together as an album.

10. Zaireeka (1997)

This mix-it-yourself four disc weirdo opus sounds like a rough sketch of The Soft Bulletin, but the parts are mostly here. It’s the Lips in 1997, so you know what to expect: lush instrumentation, tape loops, songs about “all the vaginas”, and a band moving toward a broader scope and less guitar-driven approach. What’s missing here are the tunes. That’s not to say all the songs are sub-par, and some of them definitely stand out (“Riding to Work in the Year 2025”, “A Machine in India”), but there’s no showstopper a la “Waiting for Superman” or “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” to push things over the top. Now more accessible than ever (thanks to a ready-mixed version uploaded to streaming services), Zaireeka is worth checking out as more than a curio, just keep your expectations in check.

9. Hit to Death in the Future Head (1992)

The stretch of albums from In a Priest Driven Ambulance to Clouds Taste Metallic is where the Lips hit their stride, burrowing into their unique vein of psychedelia in pursuit of a singular sound. This refinement album over album made the biggest leap with Hit to Death in the Future Head, where the Lips really leaned into their Beatles worship and matched their inventive instrumentation with honest-to-god songs. Cellos, horns, three-part harmonies, and overlapping melodies work their way into the mix, elevating tracks like “Hit Me Like You Did the First Time” and “The Sun” from noise blowouts to transcendent shoegaue-adjacent spirituals. Hit to Death is still swarming with noise, but the band peel back the curtain just enough to make the album sound like a total revelation in their discography. This is the point where the Lips became an essential band, and the albums that follow in this list are all just varying shades of the gold first glimpsed here.

8. Transmissions From the Satellite Heart (1993)

Novelty hits come a lot worse than “She Don’t Use Jelly”, the song that put the Lips on the map and opened them up to thirsty Gen-Z’ers who drove alt-rock radio to absurd heights in the early 90s. Unlike other acts whose bubbles popped them right back into obscurity though, “Jelly” came from Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, an album that continued the build from mediocrity to greatness that the Lips were on until their peak. Which is to say, this album is really good. There’s still an element of the noise rock that defined their earlier releases, but Transmissions is where they wrap that noise around an entire set of songs with consistently lovely melodies. They’d keep riding this core sound to higher heights over the decade, and Transmissions doesn’t stick out from the pack the way Clouds or TSB do, but it’s a fun, ear-catching collection front-to-back that’s underrated.

7. Clouds Taste Metallic (1995)

Clouds Taste Metallic is the big payoff, the culmination of every Lips album that came before, and the last true alt-rock album they made before making the jump into…well, all the crazy shit they’ve been doing since. Fitting, then, that first track “The Abandoned Hospital Ship” sounds like a coronation and funeral send-off at the same time. What follows are the most melodic, well-arranged, and hilarious songs Coyne & Co. had produced thus far, and it’s outta this world capital-f Fun. The highlights are almost too many to name: the madcap apocalyptic animal imagery of “Psychiatric Exploration of the Fetus With Needles”, the bouncing bass groove of “This Here Giraffe”, the jangly nihilistic “Evil Will Prevail”. They’d sand the edges off their sound (and nearly jettison electric guitars altogether) on their next few acclaimed albums, but Clouds is a scuzzy masterpiece in its own right, the last Lips album you could thrash to before they moved onto more mature themes and sounds. 

6. American Head (2020)

The best Flaming Lips albums have a central concept holding them together, and after several years in the wilderness, American Head shows the Lips can still rally around an idea and spin an affecting tale that lasts across an entire album. American Head is easily one of the prettiest Lips releases, using bucolic and folksy sounds as the backdrop for Wayne’s ruminations on childhood and innocence lost. The production flourishes are dialed back to serve the songs, with bells, strings, and synths (and Kacey Musgraves) floating through the mix instead of directing the show and exposing some of the most mature and touching lyrics in the Lips catalogue this side of “Do You Realize?”. Songs like “You and Me Sellin’ Weed”, “Flowers of Neptune 6”, and “Will You Return/When You Come Down”, all gorgeous sighs of song, are some of the most moving the Lips have ever recorded. And like the best Lips albums, this one leaves you dreaming about where the band is going to take us next.

5. The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends (2012)

Most people would say the Lips’ peak runs from 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic to 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and I would say: you’re probably right. But when it comes to personal tastes, I find their run from 2009 to 2013 just as essential. It’s where the Lips flipped off their sunnier tendencies and explored the darker side of their influences, and no album better showcases the diversity of this era of the Lips than Heady Fwends. The album’s guest list reads like a music festival poster (Ke$ha, Bon Iver, and Edward Sharpe are just the first three tracks), but each collaborator gets refracted through the Lips’ Can-like kaleidoscope until it sounds like transmissions from a jam session aboard the Nostromo.**** There are so many sounds and voices woven together so beautifully across the 13 tracks that by the time it hits its heartbreaking conclusion (the Chris Martin-featuring “I Don’t Want You to Die”), you can’t help but wonder how an album this complex and wide-ranging actually came together. Logistics aside, Heady Fwends is still a fascinating example of the Lips’ ability to shape diverse sounds to fit their psychedelic visions.

4. The Soft Bulletin (1999)

“Race For the Prize” is the best Lips opener ever, a whoosh of strings that swoops you into the action in medias res as scientists duke it out over the cure to a mysterious illness. Though the concept may sit a little too close for comfort in 2020, The Soft Bulletin is all bliss, a big hug that sounds like a Disney movie in the best possible way. What sets The Soft Bulletin apart from its predecessors isn’t so much a change in approach as the sudden, jarring maturity of all the elements they’d been using in the 90s. For most bands, this would be an achievement worth retiring over. For the Lips, they were simply in the middle of a career hot streak that would last another decade and change.

3. Embryonic (2009)

By 2009, the Lips needed a hard reset. At War With the Mystics was a jumbled flop of an album, and the one-off singles the band was releasing around the time sounded just as uninspired as the films they soundtracked. Embryonic, then, reads like course correction, a hard left into a bad trip that jettisoned the hi-fi sheen of their previous couple albums for a dark, grooving, crunchy sound that harkens back to their earlier 90s work. It fucking rules. The main inspiration here is 70s krautrock (think Tago Mago-era Can), with heady, repetitive drumming and turgid, relentless bass lines. Coyne’s lyrics are elevated to match the murky instrumentation, alternatingly nihilistic (“Evil”, “Powerless”), hopeful (“If”, “The Impulse”) and ridiculous (“I Can Be a Frog”). The highlights come late in the album—“Silver Trembling Hands”’s paranoid screams and euphoric sighs, “Watching the Planets”’s apocalyptic gong blasts—but for a drugged-out double album, this thing is consistently innovative and engaging. A guide for where the Lips would head in the next decade, the dark magic of Embryonic cast a spell that didn’t break.

2. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)

“The test begins…NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOW!” So kicks off the wondrous follow up to The Soft Bulletin: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Lips’ mainstream breakthrough and, for my money, the peak of imperial-era Lips. Perhaps because of its central concept (TL;DR: Yoshimi battles some, uh, pink robots),***** Yoshimi comes across as more cartoony and less mature than TSB, but it’s also at least in part because of the range of sound on the album. Whereas TSB had lo-fi tape deck layers hissing throughout, Yoshimi sounds as sleek and expensive as it does expansive, with electronic beats shuffling and skittering over the acid-twinged keyboards and synths burbling underneath. The melodies are consistently swoon-worthy (“In the Morning of the Magicians” and “One More Robot” are standouts), slipping into each other in a way that feels just as narratively connected as the lyrics. Yoshimi is also the album that contains “Do You Realize?”, the band’s most famous song and one of the flat-out best of the 2000s. While fully acknowledging the heaviness of life and inevitability of death, Yoshimi offers beauty and hope. A masterpiece. 

1. The Terror (2013)

I might be the only person in the world who would rank The Terror as the best Flaming Lips album. It’s cold and oppressive, a monotonous, throbbing slab of existential dread with none of the lightness and whimsy that so many associate with the band. But even though it may not be the sound most people want to hear from the Lips, it’s where they go hardest into a singular vision, and the sounds and feelings they wring out of the The Terror are awesome in the most literal sense. “Try To Explain” is the most heartbreaking song Wayne has ever sung, his high warble slowly radiating out until it dissolves into electronic vapor. The album’s centerpiece, “You Lust”, is 10 minutes of unrelenting menace, and the transitions that tie each of these tracks together hypnotize until the last notes of album closer “Always There, In Our Hearts”.****** Too bad they’d already used the title “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate”, because this is the sound of the band disappearing into the ether.

Footnotes:

*How quaint by today’s standards!

**I was in love with the Flaming Lips when Mystics came out and listened to this album a lot when it came out. I was also 15 at the time, which seems like about the right age for all the farty noises and belching synth sounds found herein. Needless to say, it’s not one I return to much anymore.

***It would be almost impossible to rank every piece of music the Lips have released. Outside of their albums proper, they’ve done uncountable collaborative EPs, albums hidden in limited-edition gummy skulls, and 24-hour song-thing that loops infinitely online. So…where does King’s Mouth fit into all this? It was a Record Store Day-exclusive (at first) concept album inspired by one of Wayne’s art installations, but since its wider release, it’s been adopted into the canon as a true blue Lips studio album. 

****The spaciest of which may be Erykah Badu’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”. But seriously, there are so many highlights on this thing—the creeping existential dread of “Is David Bowie Dying?”, the rumbling, paranoid “Do It!”—that it’s impossible to overstate how overlooked this album is. Also, Jim James has never sung a line better than “You always want to shave my balls/That ain’t my trip”.

*****Don’t worry about this too much, as the concept doesn’t really stretch outside of 3-4 songs.

******Two years after The Terror, The Flaming Lips would provide the backing band for Miley Cyrus on her Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz album.******* Several of the songs on that album started as the transition tracks on The Terror

*******I love this album.